Gustavo Petro appealed to the street again, and the street answered him again. A few weeks ago, the President of Colombia, who mobilized thousands of citizens as mayor of Bogotá and later as a presidential candidate, called on citizens to support his social reforms in the areas of health, pensions and work. Although not the same crowd as in the past, hundreds turned out to support the current president’s promises of change. “Yes, we can,” exclaimed enthusiastically the people listening to him from the Plaza de Armas of the Casa de Nariño when that room was opened for the first time to listen to a speech from the President’s balcony. “It doesn’t work without the people. What was elected was not simply a person, what was done in the election was to give government back to the people, give power back to the people,” he told them from the balcony in the tone of a ruler thirsting for it, a direct one Contact to true relationship with his governed. .
The first big lesson of the day is that the country’s largest unions are firmly committed to the president’s reform agenda. The march in the capital began around 10am with the leadership of Fecode, the trade union federation that brings together all the country’s teachers, who spearheaded the mobilization. “We will accompany labor reform that aims to end outsourcing and informality that seeks decent wages,” said one of the teachers, based on what has been said about labor reform in the media since no text has been submitted to Congress.
Supporters of the President shield themselves from the sun Chelo Camacho during his speech
“With Petro for whatever,” read a union banner at the Banco de la República, where the march passed through downtown Bogotá. Most notably, the country’s largest union organization, the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), was almost ubiquitous, but few doctors or nurses were on the march. A notable absence when the day before, in the same Plaza de Armas, the government presented the awaited text of the healthcare reform after several weeks in which the debate on it had tense the atmosphere.
The Plaza is a symbolic square between the Casa de Nariño and the Capitol, normally closed to the public and reserved for special occasions such as visits by foreign leaders, but this week it became the scene of the “socialization” of the great social reforms. On Wednesday it will be the turn of the opposition to march against the President’s proposed changes.
The Plaza de Bolívar, where part of the crowd was waiting to enter the government palace, was never completely filled, as was the case in various mobilizations against the previous president. On Sundays, when several families train in the area, it seemed a little more empty than usual. The day’s march wasn’t rebellious, it was government, and that left a less tense air in the center of town. The grocery and clothing stores on Seventh Street, the mainstay of the mobilizations, did not close for the marches, and trade seemed to function like any other day of the week. Riot police went unnoticed, almost absent, and there were no clashes between authorities and the protesters. The Petrism March did not break a single glass.
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Another lesson learned from the march was the unification of the Historic Pact, the pro-Petro left-wing coalition, against health care reform. The march was not attended by key leaders from other parties in the governing coalition, such as the Liberals or the Conservatives, who have reservations about this particular reform, although the government needs their votes in Congress to approve it. While in the Plaza de Armas, several Pact Congressmen, young and old, who have unhesitatingly supported Health Secretary Carolina Corcho, stood firm.
“This reform is one of the most controversial because we touch on privilege and we touch on a very large corruption in Colombia,” Senator Aida Avella of the Patriotic Union Party told EL PAÍS. The main reason for supporting this reform, as he explained, is that it will make it possible to create health centers in the most remote areas of the country or to strengthen the existing ones. “We have to be tolerant and think of those who don’t have anything. Think of the small towns where there isn’t even an ambulance and people are dying on us, think of places like Urabá in Choco or El Roble in Sucre where people are praying for a health station,” he says, alluding to a project which promises to draw attention to remote areas.
Also present was Representative María Fernanda Carrascal, part of the new group of Congressmen arriving at the Capitol as part of the Historic Pact. “It is necessary to mobilize because it cost us a lot to get here, these are struggles of many years, the social movements have been fighting against this healthcare reform for a long time,” he said of the Plaza de Armas itself, just before Petro’s speech. He defends the thesis that with the election of Petro and Francia Márquez at the polls, healthcare reform has been approved because it has been under construction for at least 15 years as a demand from healthcare workers and movements. He describes the fact that the President opened the doors of the Casa de Nariño as an exercise in the “democratization of space” as a “historical milestone”.
A man shows a CD of songs in favor of President CHELO CAMACHO during the rally in front of the Casa de Nariño
The text, tabled the day before, will have changes like any bill, Carrascal concedes. He does not believe that the mobilization of the streets represents pressure on the legislature, as various quarters have claimed. “We have not understood that participation should be more than representation, and effective participation takes place on the street, at the dinner table, in universities, in forums, in the media,” he argues.
The balcony on the Plaza de Armas doesn’t promise to be Petro’s last mass bath. “Colombia’s reforms, the changes, consist not only in winning elections, but in permanent mobilization,” he said in his speech. Today saw the first of those mobilizations that some critics see as a way to force Congress to back their reforms and others as a mechanism to bolster their political movement for October’s local elections. The President sees it as part of the democratic exercise. As he said in his speech, “The President of the Republic invites his people to rise up, not to kneel down, to become a crowd aware that they have the future, the present in their hands, that they have the power can have in their hands .” “.
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